October 2016: Passive Income Report while Traveling Las Vegas, Hawaii and Thailand

Being back in Chiang Mai feels awesome! I've had a great few weeks being back in the U.S. especially since I got to visit friends in LA, party it up in Las Vegas, and attend the retreat in Hawaii but honestly I've been exhausted! Maybe it was from changing time zones three times in a month or just all of the excitement going racing Lamborghinis and scuba diving with giant Manta rays, but it's time to get back to work!

Starting tomorrow the dropship partner program officially launches which means for the next 2-3 months I'll be busy managing ten new dropshipping stores! Even though part of me wishes I could just sit on the couch and watch Westworld all day, I know that as an entrepreneur it's in my blood to want to create new businesses and streams of income. It's now been over six months since I sold my last drop shipping store and I've pretty much been coasting off of passive income since then. Lets see how this month turns out!

Income from Books

It's been honestly a bit hard to not jump on board the Amazon wagon as I have friends that have been making thousands of dollars a month from publishing kindle books and selling on FBA. But I've been staying true to my goals and not taking on new projects especially since I don't like being at Amazon's mercy.

Total Book Profit: $217.01

Income from Udemy

Another month passes and another $500 is made from completely passive income from courses that I've created, uploaded and sold through Udemy. The best thing about Udemy is the fact that they continue to bring me organic sales and sales through both their affiliate and ad program, which means 80% of the profit I make from Udemy comes from sources that I never would have had access to in the first place.

The only sales I've made on my own were two that came directly from my website Dropship Lab while the rest all came from people searching directly on Udemy for courses to buy themselves. If I had more time and wanted to devote some energy to creating more courses, I could easily create a bunch of courses on different topics and increase my Udemy income to over $1,000 a month which to a lot of people would be a huge source of passive income.

Total Profit from Udemy: $515.70

*increase from $473.20 last month

My sales for my Udemy courses last month

Income from Dropshipping

I've been really excited to see how this month would go with my dropshipping store as I've made two big significant changes. The first is that I spent a few hours tweaking the settings of my paid ads and started targeting people by demographics excluding people who make less than $70,000 a year as my products are expensive, high end and not generally purchased by people with lower incomes. With all of the small changes I ended up reducing my advertising spend down to the lowest I've ever had it for this store, while still retaining 70% of the traffic I'm used to.

The other big change is having the new phone support staff instead of the VA that I had to fire as he wasn't answering phone calls when he was supposed to. After being suggested it by another dropshipper who I trust who uses them, I signed up for an account at Conversational and have had them answer my calls all month. After listening to all of the recorded calls, I'm pretty impressed and will be keeping them as my phone support. There were a few small things I would have wished they would have done differently, but for their first month I'd say they were great.

This month I've raised my ad budget a bit to get more traffic and sales and the free trial for the phone service has been used so my profit margin will be a bit lower next month but hopefully sales will be overall higher as well. All in all, I'm very happy with the way this month went, perfect timing to start my new stores with the partnerships coming up.

Total Dropshipping Profit: $2,437.28

Income from Investments

This has been a really volatile month for stocks and I have a feeling that next month due to the election it'll be even crazier. The good news is that I never count monthly gains or losses in my income reports unless I'm actually selling the stocks as the market position fluctuates up and down. What matters is that my ending balance increases overtime and I stay strong enough to buy more funds when the market is down and hold on and not sell until they are back up.

The good news is regardless of how the stock market is doing I am still getting paid a consistent amount through my eREITs with FundRise and my secured loans on PeerStreet. Months like this is exactly why I diversify and invest in both fixed investments as well as index funds. If you want to know more about everything I invest in, read this investment blog post here or listen to the Invest Like a Boss Podcast.

Total Profit from Investments: $190.08

Income from Youtube

I ordered the new ultra portable drone the DJI Mavic Pro as I got super excited about how cool it would be to fly it around places I travel and how much more awesome I can make my videos. But because of their delayed ship date, I had to cancel my order as I wouldn't have gotten it in time to bring with me back to Thailand.

If anyone likes making cool videos, there is a ton of money to me made with popular Youtube channels, but I also realized that even though I like making videos, it's not what I want to do full time so it's actually a bit of a blessing that I had to cancel my drone order. Either way, it's still fun making videos on my on schedule and it's nice getting paid by Youtube when people view them.

Total Profit from Youtube: $77.72

Income from Affiliate Earnings

A few weeks ago I wrote a blog post about how I potentially made $14,500 by sending out an email announcing a new 3% cash back rewards card. The insane thing is that without ever mentioning it again that number has grown to almost double! If you read that article though you'll know that for this particular program I'll probably only see 10% of that as the terms to quality are super high compared to something as simple as "get $25 referral credit when your friend takes their first ride with Uber."

The good news is, as I mentioned in that post, I didn't share the link just to potentially make money. I did it because I was genuinely excited about the product. As someone who loves cash back rewards cards, the idea of getting 3% back is insanely awesome to me. But the reason why I think the Zero card is a good example of the type of affiliate marketing I do is because it shows how profitable just sending out one email can be. The fact that I select what I promote very carefully as I never want to recomend anything that I wouldn't personally use or recomend means that I'm passing up hundreds of potentially high paid opportunities everyday. If you want to know more, check out my course Earnest Affiliate where I teach you how to do the same.

Total Profit from Affiliates: $17,251.76

Income from Courses

It's been a good month for signups for Earnest Affiliate and I think a lot of it is coming from the fact that some of the members in the course are starting to be very successful themselves and telling their friends about it. The fact that we have students who are making over $1,000 a month themselves really makes me feel that it's time to properly relaunch the course and increase the super low price that I started the course at.

It's on my to do list but honestly I've just been too busy with my other projects to do the updates. My goal is to create new videos and update some of the current ones and fix the current forum software which is honestly a bit clunky and ugly. The good news is that even when I do the updates and raise the price, the current members who got in at $197 will get a free upgrade to the new course. It probably won't happen this month as I'm busy with other things, but my goal is to have the course completely refreshed by January and increase the price when it does come out. So if you've been thinking about joining Earnest Affiliate, I recomend you do it now as the price will definitely go up in 2017.

Total Profit from Earnest Affiliate: $2,364.00

*increase from $1,182 last month

Misc. Business Expenses

Intern Expenses: $600

Coworking for Intern: $100

Coworking Membership for me: $100

PDF hosting with e-junkie: $5

Web hosting with SiteGround: $14.95

Payment Gateway with SamCart: $199

Affiliate Payout: $99

Email Marketing with Aweber: $50

Email Optins with OptinMonster: $16.59

Email Accounts with GoogleApps: $8

iPhone 7 Plus 128gb: $938.52 (unlocked)

Total office expenses: $2,131.52

*increase from $1,094 last month

Flying business class from Chiang Mai to Los Angeles

Misc. Travel Expenses

Flight: Chiang Mai to LAX: $2,466.48 (Business, Roundtrip)

Hotel: Las Vegas The D: $166.47 (2 nights)

Flight: LAS to LAX Southwest: $5.60 (reward points)

Flight: LAX to Kona American Airlines: $ 617.00 (Exit row, Roundtrip)

Flight: LAX to Kona United Airlines: $315 (Missed AA flight due to Southwest being late)

Passive Income for October

It's been an awesome month getting to see friends back in Los Angeles, having a crazy weekend trip to Vegas, and getting to attend and speak at the dropshipping retreat in Hawaii! Best of all, it feels great to be back in a routine and back to the coworking space here in Chiang Mai after almost 5 months of non-stop travel across Europe, through Asia all the way to the Hawaiian islands.Now that I'm back, expect bigger things in the next coming months including more streams of income added by the end of the year! But for now, here's my total passive income for the month of October, which I'm super happy about as I was able to earn this while flying in air, scuba diving underwater, and on the even while laying on the beach.

Total Passive Income: $21,959.89

*increase from $17,407.61 last month

Final Thoughts

They say that you are the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with. This month I took my first mentor JP out to lunch in LA, flew out to Hawaii to speak at my dropshipping mentor Anton's member retreat, and have been on the phone with my buddy Sam Marks every week to record the intros for the invest like a boss podcast.

I went from surrounding myself and spending time with people who would complain about being broke, to spending time with three legit Multi-Millionaires can each afford to retire and drive around a convertible Lamborghinis but instead choose to continue building businesses and helping others be successful as well.

I plan on doing a post about networking soon so keep subscribed to the email list for that, but it starts with becoming successful yourself first. No one wants to spend their time trying to convince you what's possible with hard work. They want you to have the self determination and drive put in the work yourself first regardless of who sees it. If you don't know where to get started, read my book Life Changes Quick as it outlines how I went and how you can go from having less than $1,000 in the bank to now being able to afford to buy a Lamborghini in cash. Watch this video below where I break down this month's passive income earnings in more detail.

I love how this blog, the Travel Like a Boss and Invest Like a Boss podcasts, and the supplemental books you guys frequently discuss all complement each other so well! They have really helped me discover what I truly value in life, and have helped to clearly define and cut a path for my goals.

I'm days away from saving up enough for Anton's course. I'm also extremely interested in your Earnest Affiliate course for my girlfriend and her business, as well as the blog we share. Would you suggest I run these courses alongside each other? Or should they be a completely separate focus from each other?

Hey Jason, it's funny how life ties into all aspects as it does. I'm glad you've been enjoying the podcasts and the blog. As for courses, I would focus on what is most important to you at this time. If it's creating a source of income first, I'd first focus on www.AntonMethod.com

If you are thinking about creating an audience of the years, and long term value and income in the future then join www.earnestaffiliate.com

Even though both can be complimentary, for most people, they would do better focusing on one at a time as when you have too much information without taking action, it makes it hard to launch anything.

Please take a second to log in before you comment. I've turned off the anonymous commenting option. I'm open and respectful with you, please be the same back. Stay positive, trolls and spam comments will be automatically deleted.

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